1616 – Matthias de L’Obel dies (b. 1538). French physician and botanist whose Stirpium adversaria nova (1570; written in collaboration with Pierre Pena) was a milestone in modern botany, a collection of notes and data on 1,300 plants that he had observed and gathered in France and England.

1703 – Robert Hooke dies (b. 18 Jul 1635). English physicist, born Freshwater, Isle of Wight, who discovered the law of elasticity, known as Hooke’s law. He was a virtuoso scientist who did research in a remarkable variety of fields ranging from physics and astronomy, to chemistry, biology, and geology, to architecture and naval technology.

1751 – Pierre Prévost was born (d. 8 Apr 1839). Swiss philosopher and physicist who first showed that all bodies radiate heat, no matter how hot or cold they are. In Sur l’equilibre du feu (1792) he made a significant step forward in understanding the nature of heat. With the Prévost theory of exchanges, he introduced the concept of dynamic equilibrium in which all bodies are both radiating and absorbing heat .

1765 – William Stukeley dies (b. 7 Nov 1687). English antiquary and physician whose studies of the monumental Neolithic Period-Bronze Age stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury, Wiltshire, led him to elaborate extravagant theories relating them to the Druids (ancient Celtic priest-magicians). These views were widely and enthusiastically accepted in the late 18th century.

1808 – Johann Christian Fabricius dies (b. 7 Jan 1745). Danish entomologist who was one of the great entomologists of the 18th century. After studying with Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, Fabricius travelled widely in Europe to see insect collections and produced many publications describing all the new species that he saw .

1879 – William Kingdon Clifford dies (b. 4 May 1845). British philosopher and mathematician who developed the theory of biquaternions (a generalization of the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton’s theory of quaternions) and then linked them with more general associative algebras.

1883 – Cyril Burt was born (d. 10 Oct 1971). British psychologist known for his development of factor analysis in psychological testing and for his studies of the effect of heredity on intelligence and behaviour.

1898 – Emil Artin was born (d. 20 Dec 1962). Austro-German mathematician who worked in algebraic number theory, made a major contribution to field theory, and stated a law of reciprocity which included all previously known laws of reciprocity (1927).

1918 – Arthur Kornberg was born (d. 2000). American biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 (with Severo Ochoa) for discovering the means by which deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules are duplicated in the bacterial cell, as well as the means for reconstructing this duplication process in the test tube.

1923 – TIME magazine is published for the first time. The first issue was 32 pages and featured a charcoal sketch of Congressman Joseph Gurney Cannon on the cover. It was the United States’ first, modern, news magazine.

1965 – US jets bomb Ho Chi Minh Trail. More than 30 US Air Force jets strike targets along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Since such raids had become common knowledge and were being reported in the American media, the US State Department felt compelled to announce that these controversial missions were authorized by the powers granted to President Johnson in the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

1966 – A British Overseas Airways Boeing 707 flew into a mountain wave after the captain decided to give the passengers a close-up view of Mt. Fuji. All 124 people aboard were killed.

1993 – Albert Bruce Sabin dies (b. 26 Aug 1906). Polish-American physician and microbiologist best known for developing the first oral polio vaccine (1955), which was administered to millions of children in Europe, Africa, and the Americas beginning in the late 1950s.

2004 – Belgian brewer Interbrew and Brazilian rival AmBev agreed to merge in a $11.2 billion deal that formed InBev, the world’s largest brewer.

2004 – Alec Zino dies (b. 9 Feb 1916). Portuguese ornithologist and conservationist who gave his name to Zino’s petrel, Europe’s rarest breeding bird. Only perhaps 45 mating pairs of the Zino’s petrel (Pterodroma madeira) remain on the island of Madeira, south-west of Portugal, where this small black and white seabird breeds.

2004 – In Yemen security forces arrested Abdul Raouf Naseeb, a leading al-Qaida member, along with other militants in the southern mountains.